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So small and flat.

How can I trust you if you write to me, but do not include an URL to your photoblog? How can I tell, first, what your face looks like? Isn’t that enormously important? Secondly, without a photoblog I cannot know if your perception of the world is stale or fresh. I cannot know if you look around you, and, if you do, what you’re looking at, and how. I cannot know how you dress, and whether it would be appealing to undress you. I cannot know to what canon of beauty you subscribe unless I can subject you to rigorous style analysis.
You may be a brilliant writer, like Ian Penman, and you may have a blog stuffed with lively wordplay and interesting opinions. But the world is already full of opinions, of commentaries on commentaries, glosses on glosses, and spins on spins. Photos, in a world where the word-snake dines on its own tail, give me hope. Maybe photos can break the ever-narrowing vicious circles of language. Break them with textures, colours, forms; the peculiarly irreducible specificities of the visual world.
I want to know what you look like, and what the world around you looks like. It’s tremendously important to me, because in the end I don’t care a fig about whether you pronounce in favour of this or that book, film or record, or what life has taught you. Don’t tell me, show me! I want to look at the new shapes you’re seeing, viddy the texture of your lips and the colour and condition of your teeth. I want to see your face and use your eyes, damn it, because mine are always stalling and failing.
You have no choice but to start a photoblog. It’s a course requirement in the art school of life.

—That’s pop star Momus on photoblogging. Lots of icy cool links, too. —And if what little work I’ve done in graphic design convinces me that reproductions of the teal blue of his shirt are just as untrustworthy as the words, “teal blue,” well. He nonetheless has his point. (Several, in fact.)

  1. Beerzie Boy    Jun 3, 09:59 am    #
    Well, I can understand the value of a photoblog, (i enjoy them myself) but let's face it, in this image-larded world, there's nothing better than good writing. And I believe the quote "Don’t tell me, show me!" is a paraphrase of...Hemingway.

  2. california@seahorseliberationarmy.org    Aug 2, 02:59 pm    #
    banko popular , this is meme warfare, and you cant do anything about it.

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